Many people suffer chronically from very persistent eruptive, granular, or ulcerative conditions, such as of the skin, mouth, or gastrointestinal tract. Other (sometimes the same) persons suffer from debilitating inflammatory conditions, such as disorders of the circulatory, muscular, and nervous systems. Examples of the first general category include alopecia, psoriasis, mouth ulcers, Crohn's disease, or ulcerative colitis, and examples of the second general category include arthritis, rheumatism, discoid and systemic lupus erythematosa, and muscular dystrophy. Persons so afflicted range from uncomfortable and often somewhat disfigured, to very miserable, and on to life-threatened--unless or until such condition abates.
Although sometimes such disorders may be alleviated more or less in one way or another, hitherto no readily effective treatment has been known for them individually, much less generally. Perhaps because of the lack of a recognized potentially successful treatment, many such disorders are deemed to be idiopathic. Indeed, insult may be added to injury, as unsympathetic persons characterize such patients as "mental" cases responsible--if only involuntarily--for their own condition or symptoms.
A putatively more enlightened view is that such disorders are human leucocyte antigen (HLA) related, stemming from some unbalance or malfunction of the autoimmune system. Many are so classified by one or another medical authority. Several dozen, including all or most of those listed above, are so characterized in CECIL'S TEXTBOOK OF MEDICINE, edition of 1985, for example. Many of them exhibit the Koebner phenomenon, wherein bits of otherwise normal tissue released into the bloodstream of their host, as by some trauma, are erroneously treated as antigens by the host's autoimmune system, with resultant damage to tissues of such host. However, the present example is psoriasis, evident as an eruptive manifestation of the skin.
A summary, relatively non-technical introduction to the human immune system, describing the respective functions of the various white blood cells or lymphocytes, with illustrative graphics, is found in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Vol. 169, No. 6, Jun. 1986.
My invention is directed to relieving at least the symptoms of such disorders, which are noted for their intractability under conventional treatment, thereby to enhance the quality of life of those persons so afflicted, while they are awaiting recovery from--or more overt correction of--their underlying autoimmune malfunctioning.
In addition to treatment of Crohn's disease, an affliction of the digestive tract (to which my aformentioned patent application was particularly directed), my invention is exemplified here by such treatment of psoriasis, a persistent reddening and eruptive condition of the skin. Crohn's disease and psoriasis often exist apart from one another, but sometimes both are present in the same person.